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The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the production and consumption of meat from domesticated animals in Roman Italy using zooarchaeological and textual evidence. The focus is on the proportions of meat from the three main domesticates (cattle, pig, sheep/goat) and their chronological changes.

The most important livestock meat eaten by Romans is traditionally considered to have been pork. Certainly there is much more literary evidence for pork than for beef or mutton/goat meat. Such apparent Roman preference for pork is typically seen in Apicius' De re coquinaria, where the preference for pork (11 references) over mutton (2), goat meat (1) and beef (2) is obvious; likewise, the number of references to meat from young animals is much larger for suckling pig meat (22 references) than for lamb (10), kid meat (7) or veal (4). K. D. White considered that “meat was not a prime article of diet … and beef was less important within this restricted range than pork …”. J. M. Frayn believed sheep were reared primarily for wool, not for meat or cheese, and that lamb was eaten only exceptionally. Beef and mutton/goat meat are thus considered to have been of much less importance than pork in the Roman diet.

The sacred topography of cities throughout the empire was transformed under Augustus. The remodeling of sacred spaces and buildings, the proliferation of sacred images and references to Augustus, and the redefinition of local cults within an imperial system — in effect, the emergence of the imperial cult — all affected provincial centers, where political and divine powers were expressed through art and monumental architecture. The imperial cult was a complex phenomenon, involving an interplay between imperial expectations and local initiatives. It was reinforced through a variety of media, from a new iconography of coinage to a new epigraphy of “monumental writing” across the Mediterranean. The imperial message promised a golden age of peace through divine intervention, cultural rectitude through pietas, and prosperity through the beneficence of the emperor. Colonies founded by Caesar and Augustus in the provinces responded fervently and competitively to the Augustan message, while aiming to enhance their already-considerable imperial favor.

A traveler passing by ship in front of the peninsula during the 1st c. A.D. would have marveled at a continuous chain of private villas lining the coast (figs. 1-2). Although evidence of these villas survives to the present day, our knowledge is mostly fragmentary due to the fact that many are buried beneath modern estates or have been swallowed by the sea. Between the village of Aequa (near Vico Equense) and the far side of the Sorrentine peninsula with its adjoining islets a total of 24 ruins have been identified as structures related to villae maritimae, commonly dated on the basis of their building techniques to between the Late Republican period and the start of the 2nd c. A.D. Key architectural features of these villas include different porticoes, panoramic exedras, artificial and natural grottos, galleries, nymphaea and piscinae. What all these elements have in common is that they are situated at the very point of contact with the sea and use the bedrock as the ground for construction.

Mainstream classical scholarship has long considered as lost a Roman “historical” relief, excavated in the earlier part of the 18th c. in the Palace of Domitian on the Palatine hill. Showing an emperor sacrificing, it is known as the Nollekens Relief after Joseph Nollekens, an accomplished British sculptor who came to possess it in the 18th c. Besides being a sculptor and painter, he was a sculptural restorer and dealer active between 1761 and 1770 in Rome, where he worked in the workshop of the sculptural restorer Bartholomeo Cavaceppi and in his own studio. The relief has been known chiefly from two engravings and a pen-and-watercolor drawing, all produced in the 18th c., but, rather than being lost, the relief has been hiding in plain sight in the Gatchina Palace near St. Petersburg. Its dimensions are 88 cm high x 139 cm wide. A recent visit to St. Petersburg established that the relief has been continuously in the Gatchina Palace since the late 1770s and that it had been damaged not only in antiquity but also during and after World War II. I also discovered that a cast of it existed by 1870 and that a photograph of the relief itself had appeared in an obscure Russian publication of 1914.

The hoard of silver plate known as the Vinkovci treasure (or the Cibalae treasure, after the Roman name for the town) was discovered on March 23, 2012, during rescue excavations in the town of Vinkovci (Colonia Aurelia Cibalae) in the Vukovar-Srijem county of E Croatia (fig. 1). It is one of the most significant late Roman discoveries of the new millennium, and the first major 4th-c. A.D. assemblage of silver plate to be unearthed for at least half a century (the Seuso treasure was probably found in the late 1970s, and although new pieces of the Kaiseraugst treasure emerged in the 1990s the original discovery was made in 1961). This interim report on the treasure is based upon the results of research conducted by the authors in the 4 years that have passed since it came to light.

In recent years there has been considerable scholarly interest in athletic contests in late antiquity and in the fate of the agonistic festivals that for many centuries constituted the principal occasion for them in the Greek world. The old notion that the end of the games at Olympia, and, a fortiori, that of the other great festivals of the periodos, came with the banning of pagan sacrifice by Theodosius I in A.D. 392/393 is now acknowledged to be wrong; but the evidence for these and most other agones after the beginning of the 5th c. is scanty. Some may have vanished earlier, and most of those that survived then may not have lasted very long after this date. In the West, agones of Greek type had always been very much rarer, but at Rome the Capitolia and Heliaea are attested in the mid- to late 4th c. but similarly vanish from the record at least after the early 5th c. But the absence of later evidence for agones of the traditional Greek type should not be taken to imply the disappearance of athletic contests; there were other occasions on which they could be offered, which need to be more fully acknowledged.

Modern water-supply systems — hidden beneath the ground, constructed, expanded, adapted and repaired intermittently by multiple groups of people — are often messy and difficult to comprehend. The ancient water-supply system we consider here is no different — and perhaps even more complex as it was developed over 1200 years and then had a modern city built on top. Despite this, we are beginning to understand how one of the Roman world's most important cities provided its population with water.

The remains of water infrastructure in Constantinople attest to a complex system of water-management and distribution, one that developed from the colony of Byzantium, through the growth and eventual decline of the new capital of the Roman empire, until conquest by the Ottomans. Aqueducts — the system of channels, bridges and tunnels designed to carry water through the landscape — were the focus of infrastructure investment in earlier periods, but cisterns for the storage and distribution of water were constructed throughout the time of Byzantine Constantinople.

In 2009, a set of under-lifesized statues was discovered on top of the pavement of the main N–S colonnaded street of Sagalassos. Their particular find contexts suggest that they had been on display along the street on top of statue brackets in its final phase. These statuettes not only survived in the cityscape into the 7th c. A.D., they were part of a large-scale renovation of the lower town datable to the second quarter of the 6th c. This exceptionally late example of displayed pagan mythological statuary provides information on what pieces of statuary were still available and considered suitable for re-use in the Early Byzantine period. In addition, the collection's composition can inform us about the preferred appearance of a bustling urban thoroughfare and something of the values and beliefs of the population at that period, since “whereas the common folk […] did not read Homer and Pindar, everyone — the butcher, the candlemaker, and the lower-class saint — could and did look at these statues”.

The hill of Poggio Civitate is located immediately adjacent to the small mediaeval town of Murlo, c.25 km south of Siena (fig. 1). Situated at the juncture of Tuscany's mineralrich Colline metallifere and the agricultural abundance of the Crete senese, Poggio Civitate's inhabitants drew upon the area's vast resources to emerge as a regional center of power in the 8th through 6th c. B.C.

Excavation in 2015 at the Etruscan site revealed a previously undocumented phase of monumental domestic architecture. The building in question lies immediately west of the Piano del Tesoro plateau, in the modern property zone known as Civitate A. Its architectural form, as well as the materials recovered both upon and beneath its floor, suggest that it dates earlier than the architectural complex known on the adjacent plateau.

San Vito's modern location on the Esquiline betrays little of the importance of the church's site in the pre-modern city (fig. 1). The small church was begun under Pope Sixtus IV for the 1475 jubilee and finished two years later along what was at that time the main route between Santa Maria Maggiore and the Lateran. Modern interventions, however, and particularly the creation of the quartiere Esquilino in the late 19th c., changed the traffic patterns entirely. An attempt was made shortly thereafter to connect it with the new via Carlo Alberto by reversing the church's orientation and constructing a new façade facing this modern street. This façade, built into the original 15th-c. apse, was closed when the church was returned to its original orientation in the 1970s, and, as a result, San Vito today appears shuttered. In the ancient and mediaeval periods, by contrast, San Vito was set at a key point in Rome's eastern environs.

Rural cults are an aspect of the religion and culture of Roman Hispania that it is especially difficult to analyze given the paucity of epigraphic and archaeological evidence. This is quite a recent area of research; in addition, we are dealing with often modest religious practices that are difficult to identify in the archaeological record. Particularly problematic is the lack of information regarding cult places, despite the contribution made by some pioneering studies; yet the main problem has been the dominance of a paradigm that defines rural religion as a marginal space for social life, one that followed its own evolutionary rhythm influenced by a resistance to change. According to this paradigm, rural cults seem to comprise an unsystematic accumulation of traditional ritual practices whose preferred sphere of action would have been private.

The religious landscapes of Republican-era urban communities in central and southern Italy were built on complex relationships between the inhabitants and their sacred spaces. The critical need to defend sacred sites such as temples, shrines and altars contributed directly to the shaping of urban centers and the formation of their cultural identities. Many urban centers had a separate citadel where communities protected their sanctuaries behind fortifications. In a reciprocal process the gods protected settlements. Some city gates (e.g., Volterra, Perugia, Falerii Novi) still carry prominent adornments in the form of busts and reliefs that evoke implicit civic and religious associations. The deities' presence implies a complex political and social interaction between the population, protective gods, and fortifications. As tutelary deities, their manipulation whether by a local élite or by a power such as Rome was an important part of the definition and appropriation of local identity.

The last few years have seen a growing interest in the urbanism of the Greek and Roman world. This has led to a consensus of sorts about some of its vital statistics, such as the sizes of the populations of the most important settlements and the size of the overall urban population, the urbanization rate (i.e., the share of individuals that lived in urban, rather than rural, contexts), and the total population. A good example comes from W. Scheidel in the Cambridge economic history of the Greco-Roman world. According to him, it is likely that c.1.5 million people lived in the 5 largest cities of the Greco-Roman world by the 2nd c. A.D. These included Rome, which is usually agreed to have had a population of about 1 million; Alexandria, which might have had c.500,000; Antioch, which could have had at least 150,000; and Carthage and Ephesus (Scheidel does not give explicit figures for those).

In antiquity, the production of sea salt was one of the most important sources of salt. According to Pliny the Elder (NH 31.81), the most common way of obtaining salt was through marine salinae: facticii varia genera, volgaris plurimusque in salinis mari adfuso. There are plenty of textual references to marine salt evaporation ponds: Livy (1.33) reported that Ancus Marcius opened saltworks on the Tiber next to Ostia; Pliny (NH 31.84-87) mentioned a series of examples of such installations distributed throughout the Mediterranean, while Columella (Rust. 10.135) indicated the existence of saltworks at Pompeii, and Cassiodorus (Var. 12.24) spoke of those located near Venice. Passages in Rutilius Namatianus (De red. 475-90) and Manilius (Astr. 5.682-92) are also well known for their explanations of how ancient saltworks operated.

The area under study comprises the Autonomous Community of Madrid, a highly urbanized modern region which coincides grosso modo with the N part of what used to be Carpetania. During the Early and Later Empire, it fell within the province of Hispania Citerior Tarraconensis, embracing the N part of the conventus Carthaginensis and the SW part of the conventus Caesaraugustanus. From the early days of municipalisation of the Hispanic provinces rural sites in this region belonged to the ager of three Latin municipia: Complutum, Titulcia, and Mantua Carpetanorum (fig. 1). While it is difficult to identify the precise limits of their agri, it seems probable that Complutum, as the most important urban centre in the region, would have had the largest territorium.

The archaeological site known as the “Villa degli Antonini” lies in the SE sector of the Alban Hills within the modern comune of Genzano di Roma and some 1.5 km north of the ancient urban center of Lanuvium (Lanuvio) (fig. 1). It is c.400 m south of the Via Appia between that road's 18th and 19th milestones (it seems to have been connected to the Via Appia by a side road traceable in historic aerial photographs and of which a section is still preserved) and c.1 km south of the rim of the volcanic lake of Nemi, from which the ground slopes gently down towards the coastal plain of Latium. To the west and east are two scoria cones, Monte Due Torri and Montecagnoletto, the latter of which was once separated from our site by a N-S valley c.100 m in width.

In the framework of archaeological surveys conducted in 2002-3 for the Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici dell'Umbria around the Via Flaminia, the Società Cooperativa Kronos discovered the site known as the “Villa of Rufio” (the name comes from an inscription dedicated to Caius Iulius Rufio). After 4 excavation campaigns (2003-6) the monumental character of a large villa was established, and in 2007 a team from the University of Alicante led by the first-named author began fieldwork, focusing on the analysis of agricultural and commercial production patterns through an examination of the type of manpower in use during the Augustan era. The site lies in the village of Giano dell'Umbria (Perugia), in the foothills of Gualdo Cataneo-Montefalco of southern Umbria (fig. 1). To the north is the Roman town of Mevania (Bevagna), to the south the Martani mountains, at the foot of which lies Mansio Ad Martis (Massa Martana).

While prospecting in the vicinity of Dougga in the autumn of 1999, the research group directed by M. de Vos (Università degli Studi di Trento) unearthed a large inscription dating from the reign of Hadrian. Its contents were immediately associated with the 6 major inscriptions found between the late 19th and early 20th c. concerning the conditions of exploitation of imperial property in this part of the province of Africa (NW Tunisia). The very next year de Vos presented photographs and an initial transcription of the inscription; her reading was subsequently corrected on certain points by Année Épigraphique but it remains incomplete for several lines, or one-third of the text on the preserved surface. It was therefore necessary to make a full scientific edition on the basis of a new reading.

By the end of the 1st c. A.D., Dacia had been an intermittent thorn in Rome's side for almost two centuries. The ambitions of Burebista and the actions of his various successors continued to threaten Roman hegemony along the lower Danube, culminating in the rise of the powerful kingdom of Decebalus and a substantial Roman defeat in Moesia. Domitian sent troops against the Dacians to restore the dignity of Rome (85-86 and 88-88/89), but with mixed success, finally having to settle for buying peace at a substantial price in order to free himself to deal with threats to security in both Germany and Pannonia. No doubt both the costs involved and the perceived lack of success further contributed to the hostility of Roman authors towards Domitian and left unfinished business on the Danube frontier. It is no great surprise, therefore, that Dacia was the first area to which Trajan — to whom the attitude of contemporary sources (e.g., Pliny's Panegyricus) could not have been in greater contrast — turned his attention within three years of his accession.